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Homo sapiens Populates the Earth: A Provisional Synthesis, Privileging Linguistic Evidence
Patrick Manning
Northeastern University
| Recent discoveries have provided much new information on the emergence and spread of modern humans.1 Scholars in the field of genetics have established that Homo sapiens originated in Africa in about 200,000 B.P., and that our species subsequently displaced all previous hominid species. Recent results in paleontology have gone far toward confirming these views.2 Further, while only a few scholars with degrees in history have undertaken analysis of the earliest human migrations, the comprehensive methodological approach associated with world history has been important in developing new insights into early human history.3 That is, geneticists, paleontologists, archaeologists, and earth scientists have tended increasingly to overcome the parochialism of their disciplines, linking and comparing various sorts of evidence. Taken together, scholars from these disciplines have begun to meet on the terrain of world history to revolutionize our understanding of the early life of Homo sapiens. |
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Yet there remain major gaps in our understanding of human expansion. While it is accepted that all humanity came "out of Africa," there remain disputes on the path and timing of migration from Africa to other regions. The maps and descriptions of early human migration tend to neglect migrations within Africa and include arrows suggesting a general dispersion of migrants from Africa in several directions.4 Disciplinary parochialism reasserts itself from time to time: for instance, geneticists have not yet worked sufficiently to link their results to results from other fields of study or to develop alternative models within genetics that may yield different interpretations.5 |
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Information from another field of study—linguistics—has the potential to clarify the paths of early human migration. This article argues that evidence on language classification can and should be used systematically in interpreting early human migrations.6 In it I apply techniques for analyzing language-group distributions that have led successfully to reconstructing Indo-European, Bantu, and Austronesian expansions of the past four thousand to eight thousand years. I combine these techniques with the argument that they may appropriately be applied to earlier times. This is not the first application of linguistic data to the interpretation of human dispersal, though I argue that this interpretation is distinct in its conclusions and more systematic in its approach than previous interpretations.7 |
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My narrative of early human migration begins with the movement of the densest human populations from equatorial East Africa to the northern savannas of Africa. It proceeds then to trace waterborne migration across the mouth of the Red Sea to South Arabia, then eastward along the shores of the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea, and later across the oceanic straits to Australia and New Guinea, all by about 50,000 B.P. Thereafter, the analysis considers four possible routes by which humans might have moved from the tropics into temperate zones of Eurasia, and concludes that the easternmost route, along the eastern coast of Asia, is attested most clearly by linguistic evidence. As I argue, this movement into temperate regions took place from about 45,000 to 30,000 years ago; it included the human occupation of Europe and the displacement of its preexisting Neanderthal population. Further, I argue that this same wave of migration continued north of the Pacific and to the Americas, also in the period before the great Ice Age beginning 30,000 B.P. Thereafter, the initial populations in each major world region continued to differentiate into subgroups. Thus, well before the beginnings of agriculture about 15,000 B.P., the populations of the various world regions had settled into place, and the languages of their descendants give us strong evidence of their ancestral migrations. |
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